Talking Trash at Cannes

If climate change has been a top concern for environmentalists and documentary filmmakers see, most famously, “An Inconvenient Truth” there’s a new issue coming to the fore at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Two new films premiering at the world’s most important film festival both take on the problem of waste. In “Polluting Paradise,” premiering this Friday in Cannes, Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin travels to the idyllic Turkish mountain village of Camburnu, whose way of life is threatened by the government’s decision to build a garbage landfill near the town. And in a more global approach, British filmmaker Candida Brady’s “Trashed” (premiering next Tuesday) follows actor Jeremy Irons on a worldwide trip from Iceland to Indonesia, looking at the way pollution and pollutants have affected people’s health and livelihoods.

Both films come from the directors’ personal connection to the material.

Akin learned that distant relatives eloped to Camburnu, so he visited the locale in 2005. “The beauty of this place blew me away. It was a hot and humid summer and everything was so lush and green. I kept walking around saying: ‘This place is paradise!’ But then the villagers said to me: ‘Not for much longer. They’re building a waste landfill here soon.’ They showed me the site, which had once been an abandoned copper mine, and this immediately triggered my sense of justice. No, no landfill is going to be built here; let’s all try and prevent it together!”

For Brady, her own health concerns were a major issue after her second child was born. “I knew I was not depressed but physically ill,” she says. She eventually found a doctor who diagnosed her with magnesium deficiency. “He cured me with a series of magnesium injections,” she recounts. “In a nutshell, he explained that we are all getting much fewer nutrients from our food than we should and showed me a 1950s document from the American government forewarning this.”

Brady continued to investigate the relationship between personal health and toxic substances, and was disturbed to learn that over 400 million tons of man-made chemicals are produced every year. “The other thing I found shocking is that we all have man-made dioxins in us now – extremely toxic chemicals that didn’t exist a few decades ago,” she says. “The scientific community is only just starting to understand the effect these chemicals have on us even at really low doses. You have to ask how many more can we afford to introduce into the world.”

Both filmmakers are also hoping their films can raise awareness about the dangers of waste and pollutants. But they’re also aware of the limited effect a documentary can actually have on such complicated, far-reaching issues.

“I don’t believe that ‘Polluting Paradise’ will suddenly stop the landfill,” says Akin. “That would be naive. However, I do believe that the film could create awareness and perhaps generate a discussion in Turkey so that in future such things will be dealt with differently.”

According to Akin, the landfill in the film is supposed to be closed in two or three years, but the waste will continue to seep into the earth. “They’re currently looking for a new site for another landfill that will be built under the same conditions and so the struggle continues,” he says. “Perhaps ‘Polluting Paradise’ can at least convince those responsible to build a waste incineration plant that meets international standards, because they will finally get to see that their simple solutions are making them more enemies than friends.”

Likewise, Brady wants her film to get people talking about issues of waste and sustainability. “I’ve had intelligent friends say to me recycling doesn’t really matter. We have all become disconnected from the waste we produce and we need to reconnect and make it our joint interest and change our attitudes towards it,” she says. “Waste is not just someone else’s problem. It’s affecting us all, badly. It takes very little effort to make different choices, to decide to choose a better solution for our children and their children.”

But Brady says she never really intended to make an “environmental documentary” in vein of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” “I simply wanted to know what was happening to all those throw away coffee cups, plastic pens and the take-away toys my kids played with for five minutes before chucking them in the bin,” she says. “Now I know and maybe others would like to know too.”

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